Perhaps you didn't personally get much out of the article. I did. I didn't love the invective aspects of it very much, either, but there were still some interesting take-aways and new things to say. Apparently enough so that 593 people so far thought it worthwhile to click the "upvote" button, which is really quite a staggering number when you consider that it had been banished from the front page. When you've got that many people seeing value in it - that's really quite a lot more than most of the rest of what's been on HN today - even if you don't personally see why, maybe it's enough for you to simply not see why, and leave it at that.

And that is what I am getting at. I can see the logic of the moderation just fine, but I think that the logic in question is wrong and perhaps even edging toward paternalistic or mean-spirited. And my interactions with dang on it elsewhere in the thread strike me as being mostly just defensive. Which doesn't really jive all that well with the stated purpose of elevating the quality of conversation on HN. I'm more impressed with what the broader community has done: largely looking past the flamebait, eschewing "shallow dismissals", and instead choosing to "respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says."

I don't follow. You weren't familiar with the rules of HN dupery and I've tried to explain them. That's not moving the goalposts. Followups are almost always dupes. Metaish follow-ups the very next day dupely so.

With all due credit to rmasters, "I suspect it would not have been flagged if the topic were different."

Please don't strawman me like that. If you're going to make "the rules of HN dupery" the place where you want to make your stand, then this seems like a peculiar response. These rules for HN dupery are not actually published anywhere outside of HN mod team comments when debates like this come up. By contrast, though, the published commenting guidelines clearly state "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."

Which, I realize that this whole tangent is then in contrast with the very next guideline in the list, which exhorts us to "Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents." But, since HN lacks the meta-discussion channels that other comparable community sites have, these sorts of frustrations can't really do aything but boil over into public every so often, so I'm self-consciously allowing myself the conceit. In my defense, I've also been following and engaging in what I thought was some of the more interesting HN discussion I've seen in a minute. Including having my opinion on a programming language and its community go through some positive changes. So I do somewhat feel, then, that HN moderation deciding to flag the article and then bury it on the 2nd page because they think it's just a flamewar is tacitly an unfair accusation against which I must defend myself. And, frankly, the alternative defense that it's because it isn't interesting comes across as dismissive and condescending.

From the way you've written on this thread, it seems pretty clear that you're not the kind of message board nerd that makes 'dang's comments a daily read. That's fine! You have to be a pretty extreme nerd to do that, and there other, probably better things to spend those nerd points on. But you should take 'pvg's word for it on this stuff. He's not messing with you: he's trying to explain to you how the site works.